Lil Hardin Armstrong And Her Orchestra

Lil Hardin Armstrong (1902?-1971) was, as the saying goes, present at the creation. Classically trained, she had been in the piano chair of King Oliver's seminal Creole Jazz Band for two years when in 1922, a young unknown cornetist named Louis Armstrong joined the group and began to make history. Lil, who married Armstrong in 1924, encouraged her husband to leave Oliver for Fletcher Henderson's pioneering big band and, subsequently, to go out on his own. In the mid-to-late Twenties she becam… MORE